At the end of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama famously wrote that our world may be at the “end of history” where “Western liberal democracy” becomes “the final form of human government.” A quarter century on, such optimism seems naive. Consider the United States, the paragon of liberal democracy. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll finds...
Year: 2014
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Iraqi Christians’ Bloody Summer
Christian women are being raped and murdered, Christian men are being shot execution-style or strangled or crucified. And now we have reports of Christian children—it rends the soul to say—beheaded and set on display in public parks. This is Mosul in the summer of ’14, under the control of ISIS, the Islamic State. A man’s...
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Up to Our Eyeballs in Gaza
I listen to Rush Limbaugh about 15 minutes a day, which is the time it takes by car to go to and from my house for lunch. Fifteen minutes is more than enough time to get the gist of what any “on air personality” will say, over and over repeating himself and ringing the changes...
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Israel: Tactical Winner, Strategic Loser
The events in Gaza since July 7 have shown, not for the first time, Israel’s difficulty in coping with the challenges of asymmetric warfare. The problem first became apparent in Lebanon exactly eight years ago (July-August 2006), when Hezbollah – the weaker party by several orders of magnitude – was able to exploit Israeli political...
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The Alphaville Dictionary III
Ponzio’s iconic diner (in South Jersey) is turning 50; designer Milton Glaser is creating an iconic environmental logo for his line of eye ware; steel and Domino’s sugar are iconic industries; Smokey Bear is an iconic symbol of wildfire prevention; and Roberts Shoe store—an iconic Chicago institution—is closing its doors. These are just a few...
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A War on Whites?
Alabama Republican congressman Mo Brooks generated outrage among the usual suspects this week by telling Laura Ingraham that the Obama Adminstration’s push for amnesty for illegal immigrants is “a part of the war on whites that’s being launched by the Democratic Party. And the way in which they’re launching this war is by claiming that...
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The Cobbler’s Sons
The cobbler’s son goes barefoot. This English proverb could almost serve to illustrate the entry for “paradox” in a dictionary of philosophy. The paradox of capitalism is that, instead of selling their souls to the devil, its adepts give them away for free. One would think that all those masters of the universe, well used...
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Why you should see the silents, part II
It’s all very well to say, as I do, that you should see the silents because in them you will see every development in film style—except synchronized sound—freshly created and, in most cases, as artfully exploited as they ever have been. But the...
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Summer Reading, Part II
After coming back from magnificent (unless you’re talking about the food), yet woefully underrated Prague in late August of 2008, I immediately read Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Švejk, a satirical novel based on the misadventures of a Falstaffian Czech soldier during World War I. Like Druon’s novels, the unfinished Švejk was extremely popular both...
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Srdja Trifkovic on RT: U.S. dictating terms of E.U. foreign policy
Video posted August 5, 2014: RT: The National Guard is heavily involved in the current crackdown on anti-government forces in the East. So how do you think their training and arming by the U.S. will affect the course of the conflict? ST: It is very important to point out that the National Guard is, in...
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Nixon—Before Watergate
It has been a summer of remembrance. The centennial of the Great War that began with the Guns of August 1914. The 75th anniversary of the Danzig crisis that led to Hitler’s invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. The 70th anniversary of D-Day. In America, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights...
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Too Quiet Flows the Don
The stone head from the Iron Age glowers out of its glass case as if outraged by the indignity of imprisonment, its relegation from totem to tourist attraction. Not that there are ever many tourists in Doncaster Museum, especially on a unseasonably warm day when the sun-punished town seems full of the grit and stink...
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No Free Lunch
This summer, as U.K. schoolchildren go on vacation, their school buildings will become hives of activity. Construction workers will descend in droves to overhaul kitchens and dining halls. These need to be refitted for a major new purpose. Starting in September, state primary schools will be serving free hot lunches to all pupils in their...
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Summer Reading, Part I
Some people can trace the stages of their life by the liquor they drink or the clothing style they adopt. Being very ecumenical when it comes to liquor, I prefer to trace the events of my life by the books I read. Turns out, almost every summer and every...
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Unshattered
Admittedly, I approached Amanda Bell with a degree of caution. I am, to say the least, wary of fiction, especially fiction centered around a female protagonist who is on a path of self-understanding and realization. The soppy novels of an Emily Giffin or a Helen Fielding come to mind. But rest assured, Jeff Minick’s first...
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Diversity Where It Counts
A work of genuine scholarship tells us what we did not know before and does so felicitously—it is a contribution to the world’s body of knowledge. Discouragingly, a majority of academic books that have bounced across my desk in recent years either regurgitate what was told better long ago, or are the distorted remnants of...
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Some More Memories
One of my history department chairmen had the habit of hiring at whim as instructors various unqualified people, lacking appropriate degrees and without the vetting that was usually done. A new, more professional chairman decided, rightly, to get rid of them. One was a radical African-American preacher, notorious for complaints and a cavalier attitude toward...
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Carry On
The modern world abounds in modern heresies. One might say that modernity itself is a heresy—modernity understood in the broadest possible terms as the antithesis of the traditional: the fundamental distinction, as Claude Polin recently argued in this magazine, overlying all subordinate political and cultural oppositions, beginning with liberalism and conservatism, right and left. Modern...
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Whens, Ifs, and Buts
When did World War II start? An American is entitled to think it started with Pearl Harbor, as, clearly, the world without the United States is only a world in part. But ask an Englishman, and he will say the world war began some two years earlier, when Britain declared war on Germany. A Russian...
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Nouns Have Gender
“Congratulations! It’s a boy!” Does that sound like hate speech to you? No? Well, obviously, you’re a cisgender bigot. That’s how Slate’s C.S. Milloy sees it . . . Wait, you don’t know what a “cis” is? What’s wrong with you? In today’s gender-studies-enriched society, a “cis” is a “you,” or “your wife,” or all...
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Vocation and the Humane Economy
I once sat on the honors orals of an economics major who had applied a standard mathematical model to immigration. The mathematics and data collection were well done, but the thesis was premised on the assumption we can understand immigration by analyzing a sufficiently large sample of economic data with a reputable mathematical model. Were...
Issue
August 2014
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Songs of Innocence and Experience
Ida Produced by Canal + Polska Directed by Pawel Pawlikowski Screenplay by Pawel Pawlikowski and Rebecca Lenkiewicz Distributed by Music Box Films The personal is the political: This 1960’s catchphrase defiantly bandied by leftists and feminists has always seemed to me childishly peevish. It’s as if, in a fit of collective pique, those on the...
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Practical Distributism
Distributism is a Catholic social philosophy that, as Thomas Storck writes, “seeks to subordinate economic activity to human life as a whole, to our spiritual life, our intellectual life, our family life.” Unfortunately, distributism is frequently debated or discussed in terms of macroeconomics—a national economic system. But the more important activity is already occurring at...
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Recess Games
“Supreme Court sharply limits presidential power on recess appointments.” Thus read the headline in the Los Angeles Times after the High Court’s decision in National Labor Relations Board v. Canning. Applying its spin to the decision, National Review opined that “the Court rejected the administration’s power grab on recess appointments” and clarified when a recess...
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Buy American: Compelling Reasons
For years, the media and Hollywood have sent the message that anyone who wants to be fashionable should eschew American products and buy foreign ones. Recently, Mike Rowe, the host of Dirty Jobs, put a different message on Facebook: “If you want to live in a country that builds things, you have to buy things...
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Reading Poe
While he is to be complimented on an absorbing essay, Egon Richard Tausch (“The Writer and the Lawyers,” Vital Signs, May) goes too far in claiming that Poe “despised” the New England poets and “proved without [sic] a doubt” that Longfellow, in particular, was “a pathological plagiarist, poem by poem.” More than once in his...
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The May Issue
I was delighted to see that the May issue was focused on Ukraine, the largest European country. While there is no point in polemicizing with those of your contributors who believe in an amoral Realpolitik—after all, if force trumps ideas, what is the point of words?—most of their analyses of Ukraine merit a response. I...
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And All Shall Equal Be
This is our annual summer vacation issue, which means I am free to ramble on like an old lizard soaking up gin and sunshine at the beach and telling stories that all begin, “Did I ever tell you about the time . . . ” Did I ever tell you about the time I first...
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The Gentile Church V
Instead of celebrating the Jewish Sabbath (the seventh day of the week), the faithful gradually broke with Jewish custom and assembled, instead, on the first day of the week, the Lord’s Day, which they identified with the first day of Creation. They came together to sing hymns, hear the good news preached, make common prayers,...
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Football Mafia
The greatest criminal and most profitable enterprise in the world is FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association). As I write, billions are watching obscenely overpaid footballers competing for a cup that is long overdue for a total remake. The World Cup was a very good idea long ago, but so was selective democracy and waging...
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A Joint Criminal Conspiracy
The Great War started 100 years ago this August. The most tragic event in human history, that war destroyed a vibrant, magnificently creative civilization. A prosperous and well-ordered world was shattered forever. New killing machines that only a generation earlier did not exist were deployed on a massive scale: airplanes, tanks, poison gases, submarines. The...
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Something With Pages
Some thoughtful soul, not I, would perhaps have some positive words about the present volume, and not without some justification. There is much to be said in praise of the Library of America and the quality of its volumes in various categories of presentation, and in the past I not only have acknowledged such manifest...
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Country
Maximus: Marcus Aurelius had a dream that was Rome, Proximo. That is not it. That is not it! Proximo: Marcus Aurelius is dead, Maximus. We mortals are but shadows and dust. Shadows and dust, Maximus! —from Ridley Scott’s Gladiator Every time I watch the above scene from Gladiator, that powerful movie about the decadence of...
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The Fruits of Fraud
The worst thing about the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 legalization of abortion in all 50 states and U.S. territories has not been the 55 million—and counting—dead babies, as horrible as that has been, but the damage it has caused to the rule of law, specifically the U.S. Constitution. In his dissent, Justice Byron White branded...
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Neocon Nightmare
I have a recurring nightmare in which the war criminals who lied us into Iraq reappear to mock the hundreds of thousands they murdered in cold blood, repeating the same lies, the same rationalizations, the same mindless slogans that lured us into that hellhole to begin with. Bill Kristol, the Kagan clan, the Israel Firsters,...
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Silver or Lead: The Reverse Assimilation of the Southwest
Texas attorney general and gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbot committed what is commonly called a political gaffe earlier this year when he said what every thinking person this side of the Rio Grande already knew: Mass immigration from Mexico means the importation of Mexican corruption and the steady erosion of law and social trust that too...
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Chinese Exclusion
Five years ago, the California state legislature voted to apologize to the Chinese for former laws that discriminated against them, including the federal government’s Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which California congressmen championed. The apology bill was sponsored by state assembly members Paul Fong and Kevin de León. Fong said he was not planning on...
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Russia and the West: The Tragedy of 1204 Redux
In April 2008 I published this article on our website (the link is no longer available). In view of the crisis in and over Ukraine and the ongoing overall deterioration of relations between “the West” and Russia, its key points are even more pertinent today – over six years later – than they were then....
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Marina of Arc
Tomorrow, July 31, is a great moment in the history of British jurisprudence. Let me explain. If you believe, as do I, that our civilization is spiralling downward, you may agree that – here as in Britain or anywhere else in the West – courts of law are no different in this regard than apples...
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A GOP Ultimatum to Vlad
With the party united, the odds are now at least even that the GOP will not only hold the House but also capture the Senate in November. But before traditional conservatives cheer that prospect, they might take a closer look at the foreign policy that a Republican Senate would seek to impose upon the nation....
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The Zoophiles of Gaza
A video, reportedly shot by an Israeli drone over the war-torn Gaza Strip has been circulating on various social networks. The footage shows several Hamas fighters, decked out in kuffiya headscarves, having sexual intercourse with a goat or a sheep. Stunningly revolting, but hardly surprising. After all, zoophilia was always quite common, if not widespread...
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The Return of the Barbarians
The Return of the Barbarians by Vince Cornell My son has started karate classes, and I have taken the opportunity to dust off my old gi and start working out with them at the same time. This renewed interest in hand-to-hand self defense lead me to some research on the internet, mostly through a few...
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MH17: The Interim Score
In the end we may never know with certainty who shot down the Malaysian airliner on July 17, and under what circumstances. My assessment, made in the immediate aftermath of the disaster – that it was engineered by deliberately guiding the airliner into harm’s way – will be further examined in this article. Patrick Buchanan’s...
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The Death Throes of an Imperial Nation
Iowa is bracing itself for the storm. The danger is not coming from the tornadoes that sweep across the plains this time of year, but from the Central American illegal immigrant “children,” eager to partake of the joys of life here in Middle America. 139 so far have come in, and if Iowa’s Marxists and...
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“French” youths strike again
Living in Forest Hills, a predominantly Jewish part of Queens (Simon and Garfunkel, the Ramones, and Jerry Seinfeld all grew up here), I have a fairly good sense of the both liberal American and rightwing Soviet Jewish opinion. Israel’s Gaza offensive of the last few weeks and the anti-Israel demonstrations in Europe, which degenerated into...
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Fascism in Montford
During the early morning hours of Monday, March 31, an unidentified person or persons smashed out the window of a ten-year-old Honda Civic parked on Cumberland Street in the neighborhood of Montford in Asheville. The car is registered in my name. My son, who works here in Asheville, had used the car for several years...
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QUI PRODEST?
The Malaysian and Dutch embassies in Kiev are covered with heaps of flowers. But not a single little flower is brought in the memory of the victims of the bombings of Lugansk, which happened on the same day as the downing of flight MH17. And where would the flowers be brought? Kiev does not have...
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An Immigrant’s Plea
Perhaps because I am myself an émigré, I have never “written on immigration,” which is almost a fulltime vocation for many a political commentator whose intelligence and nous are otherwise indubitable. The temptation arises when that perennially controversial issue cuts across others closer to my heart, such as the freedom of speaking one’s mind or...
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Why you should see the silents, part I
Silent movies are to movies in toto as classical Greek and Roman drama is to all of European drama. Of course, cinema is one of the latest progeny of the classical dramatic tradition, so one can’t claim the silents invented any wheels in terms of plot and characterization; those haven’t changed since Euripides and Menander....